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Register a new userInformation and thermodynamics: Experimental verification of Landauers erasure principle
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Authors
Antoine Berut
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We present an experiment in which a one-bit memory is constructed, using a system of a single colloidal particle trapped in a modulated double-well potential. We measure the amount of heat dissipated to erase a bit and we establish that in the limit of long erasure cycles the mean dissipated heat saturates at the Landauer bound, i.e. the minimal quantity of heat necessarily produced to delete a classical bit of information. This result demonstrates the intimate link between information theory and thermodynamics. To stress this connection we also show that a detailed Jarzynski equality is verified, retrieving the Landauers bound independently of the work done on the system. The experimental details are presented and the experimental errors carefully discussed
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In 1961, R. Landauer proposed the principle that logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility and further theorized that the erasure of information is fundamentally a dissipative process. Landauer posited that a fundamental energy cost is incurred by the erasure of information contained in the memory of a computation device. His theory states that to erase one binary bit of information from a physical memory element in contact with a heat bath at a given temperature, at least kT ln(2) of heat must be dissipated from the memory into the environment, where k is the Boltzmann constant and T is the temperature. Although this connection between information theory and thermodynamics has proven to be very useful for establishing boundary limits for physical processes, Landauer principle has been a subject of some debate. Despite the theoretical controversy and fundamental importance of Landauer erasure in information technology, this phenomenon has not been experimentally explored using any practical physical implementation for digital information. Here, we report an investigation of the thermodynamic limits of the memory erasure process using nanoscale magnetic memory bits, by far the most ubiquitous digital storage technology today. Through sensitive, temperature dependent magnetometry measurements, we observed that the amount of dissipated energy is consistent with the Landauer limit during an adiabatic erasure process in nanoscale, single domain magnetic thin film islands. This result confirms the connection between information thermodynamics and physical systems and also provides a foundation for the development of practical information processing technologies that approach the fundamental limit of energy dissipation.
Almost sixty years since Landauer linked the erasure of information with an increase of entropy, his famous erasure principle and byproducts like reversible computing are still subjected to debates in the scientific community. In this work we use the Liouville theorem to establish three different types of the relation between manipulation of information by a logical gate and the change of its physical entropy, corresponding to three types of the final state of environment. A time-reversible relation can be established when the final states of environment corresponding to different logical inputs are macroscopically distinguishable, showing a path to reversible computation and erasure of data with no entropy cost. A weak relation, giving the entropy change of $k ln 2$ for an erasure gate, can be deduced without any thermodynamical argument, only requiring the final states of environment to be macroscopically indistinguishable. The common strong relation that links entropy cost to heat requires the final states of environment to be in a thermal equilibrium. We argue in this work that much of the misunderstanding around the Landauers erasure principle stems from not properly distinguishing the limits and applicability of these three different relations. Due to new technological advances, we emphasize the importance of taking into account the time-reversible and weak types of relation to link the information manipulation and entropy cost in erasure gates beyond the considerations of environments in thermodynamic equilibrium.
The clean world of digital information is based on noisy physical devices. Landauers principle provides a deep connection between information processing and the underlying thermodynamics by setting a lower limit on the energy consumption and heat production of logically irreversible transformations. While Landauers original formulation assumes equilibrium, real devices often do operate far from equilibrium. We show experimentally that the nonequilibrium character of a memory state enables full erasure with reduced power consumption as well as negative heat production. We implement the optimized erasure protocols in an optomechanical two-state memory. To this end, we introduce dynamical shaping of nonlinear potential landscapes as a powerful tool for levitodynamics as well as the investigation of far-from-equilibrium processes.
New concepts from nonequilibrium thermodynamics are used to show that Landauers principle can be understood in terms of time asymmetry in the dynamical randomness generated by the physical process of the erasure of digital information. In this way, Landauers principle is generalized, showing that the dissipation associated with the erasure of a sequence of bits produces entropy at the rate $k_{{rm B}}I$ per erased bit, where $I$ is Shannons information per bit.
We investigate the performance of majority-logic decoding in both reversible and finite-time information erasure processes performed on macroscopic bits that contain $N$ microscopic binary units. While we show that for reversible erasure protocols single-unit transformations are more efficient than majority-logic decoding, the latter is found to offer several benefits for finite-time erasure processes: Both the minimal erasure duration for a given erasure and the minimal erasure error for a given erasure duration are reduced, if compared to a single unit. Remarkably, the majority-logic decoding is also more efficient in both the small erasure error and fast erasure region. These benefits are also preserved under the optimal erasure protocol that minimizes the dissipated heat. Our work therefore shows that majority-logic decoding can lift the precision-speed-efficiency trade-off in information erasure processes.
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